Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1 (2021) 125-133
1 Faculty
of Engineering Technology, University College TATI, 24100, Kemaman, Terengganu,
MALAYSIA.
*Corresponding author: nurulhudamt@uctati.edu.my
KEYWORDS ABSTRACT
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Fish keeping is a popular trend nowadays. People from all the age groups like to keep fish at
the homes, offices etc. for decoration purpose or as a hobby. Commercial fish farming and
ornamental fish farming has become very popular. Over again it is difficult to check the conditions
of an aquarium manually especially those who are frequently outstation and vacation. Hence, it’s
important to develop an automated aquarium that can be monitored and controlled remotely.
A monitoring system using IoT on an automated aquarium is not a new system in today’s
world; it is a machine that allows the user to automatically control the pH level, temperature level,
turbidity level, water level, feed the fish etc. There are various ways to achieve this goal of allowing
the user to control the machine at a long distance. As it is difficult to check the conditions of an
aquarium manually. Here, IoT connected system is proposed to monitor and control the whole
aquarium using electronics and will communicate or transmitting real time status to user
smartphone.
Received April 2021; received in revised form May 2021; accepted June 2021.
Freshwater fish are those that spend some or all the lives in fresh water, such as rivers and
lakes, with a salinity of less than 0.05%. These environments differ from marine conditions in
many ways, the most obvious being the difference in levels of salinity. To survive fresh water, the
fish need a range of physiological adaptations. 41.24% of all known species of fish are found in
fresh water. This is primarily due to the rapid speciation that the scattered habitats make possible.
When dealing with ponds and lakes, one might use the same basic models of speciation as when
studying island biogeography.
The project is an automated system to take care of fishes. It will monitor the physical changes
in the water and will maintain it to the ideal conditions, with required changes. The aquarium will
perform all the operations automatically like temperature control, pH control, turbidity control,
feeding, water level control etc. It will reduce the manual effort required in maintenance of
aquariums by automating the aquarium management process.
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that the android based end devices can access the data and take the appropriate actions. The
strength of this project is the implementation of Internet of things (IoT) concept. Android
application is used to monitor and control the sensors and actuator that are connected to the
microcontroller through the cloud services. This helps the user to access the information about
the aquarium and control them from anywhere in the world through internet easily. The
weakness of this project is although they have sensors to examine the aquarium condition and
android apps to monitor and control the aquarium’s actuator, the system still need human’s
interference to control the servo motor for feeding, to switch on or off the light for aquarium and
to change water pump for the aquarium.
A.N.Prasad et. al., proposed Smart Water Quality Monitoring System. This system consists of a
microcontroller board called Waspmote with external ADC connected to different sensors such as
pH, water temperature, turbidity, conductivity sensors. All the water information will be collect
by the Waspmote microcontroller board and store them in two places either sends to Cloud
through GSM and or store in SD card. The strength of this project is the complexity of the product.
This product is very easy to use just by connecting the sensors and connects the microcontroller
across the internet; user can easily access the information about the water quality either in
aquarium, lakes or pond easily using the end devices. However, although the product is easy to
use, the cost of the product has to taken into account.
Taotao and Feng, develop a Fuzzy Decision System based embedded water quality monitoring
platform. In simple, a system that can take appropriate decision based on the data get from the
sensors. The advantage of this research is the research itself that is a system that can make
appropriate decision. This type of system is very important because human can’t monitor the
aquaculture all the time. Besides, in critical situation, human might not able to make correct
decision on correct time due to panic. With this system, when there are some changes in the
aquaculture, the system able to monitor them and take an appropriate action for the changes.
The weakness of this project is it only the result of the decision-making is send to the aquaculture
farmers via GPRS or messages. The farmers will be not notifying about the sensor values for
example the temperature value or the pH value of water in real time.
Based on the previous related research, this project comes out with the solution. For the cost
and portability issue can be solved by using a single board computer called Arduino/ESP8622 as
main controller of the system. The system has the ability to make own appropriate decision based
on the sensors value of the aquarium. The system will feed the fish on time and change the water
of aquarium when the water turns cloudy automatically without human interferences.
3.0 METHODOLOGY
The project is an automated system that monitor the physical changes in the water and will
maintain it to the ideal conditions. The aquarium will perform all the operations automatically
like temperature, pH, turbidity, feeding time and water level. The IoT monitoring system will
constantly transfer the status of the aquarium on the database and users can monitor them
through the internet. Figure 1 shows the block diagram of the project. This project has input from
IoT platform as a control device. For the processing device used in this project is microcontroller
Arduino/ESP8266. For the output devices used in this project is database from sensors.
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As shown in Figure 2, this is a flow chart of the project. All sensor always running and continues
data collection. When any problem is detected by sensors, it will send the notification at IoT
platform to mention as an alert and it will monitor automatically.
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Figure 4 shows the complete hardware design where all sensors, water pump, heater, LED
lamp, fish feeder and fan cooler are arranged in aquarium.
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The food or pallet that sink in the tank and dissolve in water aquarium can be cause an
increasing the ammonia, pH level, temperature, turbidity, odor, and decreasing dissolver oxygen
Freshwater fish thrive in a range between 5.5 and 7.5 while the temperature must in ranging
between 24°C to 32 °C. The result shown in Table 1 is the average value taken daily for one week.
The automatic design system proved to be able to maintain the appropriate condition for the
freshwater fish to live in.
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5.0 CONCLUSION
In conclusion, an IoT based aquarium monitoring system is developed in this project. The main
goal of this system is to assist the aquarium owner in maintaining and monitoring the aquarium
in more convenient and easier way. This aquarium monitoring system is reliable with real-time
based ability to update the users on the current situation. Besides, the system also performed own
decisions making based on the preprogramed instruction without the user interferences. The
quality of the water based on temperature sensor and pH sensor is kept at appropriate level to in
help the cultivation of freshwater fish.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The authors gratefully acknowledge the University College TATI for the support.
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